Author Archives: John F. Lindner

On Wednesday, September 13, 1989, I met with newly elected Physics Club officers Tom Taczak ’91, Dennis Kuhl ’90, Doug Halverson ’91, and Karen McEwen ’90 in Westminister House. I wrote in my diary, “first phys club meeting w. officers goes well”. That year … Continue reading →
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One of my favorite illustrations is the cannon thought experiment from volume three of Isaac Newton‘s Principia Mathematica. Johannes Kepler argued that planets orbit elliptically with Sol at one focus. Galileo Galilei argued that terrestrial bodies fall parabolically in space … Continue reading →
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I’ve been fascinated by aperiodic tilings of the plane since Martin Gardner first wrote about them in Scientific American. In the 1960s, Robert Berger discovered a set of 20 426 prototiles or tile-types that can tile the plane but only with no … Continue reading →
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As a kid, I devoured the pages of Popular Science magazine and was fascinated by the quest for human-powered flight: Was a flying bicycle possible? In the mid 1970s, I read that aerospace engineer Paul MacCready had assembled a team … Continue reading →
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There is a fantastic castle in the sky, built in free fall, brick-by-brick. It derives its energy from sunlight and recycles its water. Sealed against a vacuum, its inhabitants float and glide through its passageways as the sun rises and … Continue reading →
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1930s businessman Edgar Kaufmann Sr. and his family lived in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Kaufmann owned a rural retreat outside the city and wanted a weekend home there. He assumed his 67-year-old architect would design the home with a good view of … Continue reading →
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The tallest structure in the world since 2008, Burj Khalifa (or Khalifa Tower) is the fantasy skyscraper of my childhood. Designed and engineered by Adrian Smith and Bill Baker of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), it is an architectural and … Continue reading →
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Chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to the initial conditions and parameters that define them. Minute perturbations of the parameters can even convert chaotic motion to periodic motion. This alliance between control methods and physics — cybernetical physics — opens the … Continue reading →
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Momentum conservation (or Newton’s third law) ensures two-way or bidirectional coupling for typical media like guitar strings and spring mattresses. One-way or unidirectional coupling enables the propagation of solitary waves or solitons with diverse behaviors in otherwise dissipative media, but … Continue reading →
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Wind is free and ubiquitous and can be harnessed in multiple ways. We recently published an article in the Physical Review demonstrating mechanical stochastic resonance in a tabletop experiment that harvests wind energy to amplify weak periodic signals detected via the movement … Continue reading →
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